Tom Thomson

Canadian painter

• Born: August 4, 1877
• Birthplace: Claremont, Ontario, Canada
• Died: July 8, 1917
• Place of death: Canoe Lake, Ontario, Canada

In landscape paintings of vibrant color and energetic, bold brushwork like that of the Impressionists, Thomson helped steer a course toward an indigenous Canadian artistic expression. His greatest achievement was to evoke a powerful sense of the north woods of Canada.

Early Life

Although Tom Thomson is one of Canada’s leading cultural figures of the twentieth century, in popular imagination his life is based as much on myth as on fact. His untimely death in 1917, in undetermined but almost certainly accidental circumstances, cut short a career that had begun to blossom only a decade earlier and lent a trace of mystery to his life’s story.

Thomson was born to John and Margaret Thomson in a stone house in Claremont, Ontario, and grew up on a farm named Rose Hill, near Leith, Ontario, on Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. He enjoyed a rural boyhood typical of the time, taking the usual interest in fishing and sports. His mother had a good library, and Thomson inherited her interest in literature, particularly Romantic poetry. The family enjoyed music, and Thomson seems to have played several instruments and later took voice lessons. In adult life, Thomson was not considered by his friends to be particularly literate or well educated, but he had a strong appreciation of fine things, both in the materials of his craft and in his lifestyle; he seems to have been the product of a relaxed and genteel home environment.

At age twenty-one, Thomson inherited approximately two thousand dollars, in those days a considerable sum, but the money was quickly spent. In 1899, he was apprenticed as a machinist, a career that lasted less than a year. A year’s attendance at a business college in Chatham, Ontario, was followed by enrollment in a lettering and penmanship course in Seattle, Washington, at a business college cofounded by his eldest brother. After six months, Thomson left his studies to enter the photoengraving trade.

Thomson abruptly returned to Canada in 1904, apparently after his proposal of marriage to a girl of fifteen was rejected. For the next decade he continued his work as a commercial artist in various photoengraving houses in Toronto on a freelance as well as a salaried basis. The scanty evidence of his earliest personal artistic endeavors shows little originality and only a modest range of skill. Part of his stock-in-trade as an illustrative artist were drawings of fashionable women in the manner originated by Charles Dana Gibson with the “Gibson Girl.” Thomson himself was a tall, attractive man with a penchant for silk shirts and a good pipe, who appreciated unforced sophistication.

Life’s Work

Around 1908, Thomson began to associate with a group of creative men who stimulated his latent artistic genius. Most of these were colleagues in commercial art, including J. E. H. MacDonald, Frederick Varley, and others who were to come together in 1920 as the Group of Seven . In the years just before the outbreak of World War I, Thomson and his congenial friends began to portray with fresh vision the landscapes of Southern Ontario, Algonquin Park, and the area of Thomson’s boyhood home, Owen Sound.

Thomson had been sketching in pen-and-ink and in watercolor at least since his years in Seattle. His work was, at best, attractively conventional; at worst, it was clumsy and imitative. From his years as a commercial artist, there are numerous examples of competent design in an Art Nouveau manner, a style that was by that time so broadly disseminated as to be nearly exhausted. Beneath the mediocrity of his early commercial and personal artistic endeavors, however, Thomson was assimilating much from the broader world of art though not, to be sure, from the most advanced styles of the day such as cubism. Just how, and why, his association with such artists as MacDonald, Frank Johnston, and others liberated this growing store of knowledge is not well documented, but it is clear from the anecdotes and memoirs of his circle that Thomson was an energetic and adventurous painter and was able to grasp and extend artistic ideas with speed and insight. That he had the good fortune to associate with some of the strongest artistic personalities of the day in Canada, and to share ideas freely with them, is one of the signal events in the development of Canadian art and culture.

In the spring of 1912, Thomson began the final, brief phase of his career with a productive two-week sketching trip in Algonquin Park in the company of the painter H. B. Jackson. In late July, he began a tour by canoe of Spanish River with another colleague, William Broadhead, then went on by steamer at the end of September to Owen Sound. These and subsequent trips were both creative and recreational, for they were fit into a busy schedule of commercial work that occupied the greater part of the year. For Thomson as well as for many of his artist friends, these years initiated the discovery of an identifiably Canadian subject matter, the northern forest, and of an artistic language that, if not wholly original, was unique in flavor.

In the fall, Thomson was back in Toronto, employed by the firm of Rous and Mann for seventy-five cents per hour, a good wage for 1912. He had much to show for his summer’s efforts, and it was no longer only his fellow workers who were excited by his sketches: He was soon to have a painting purchased by the Ontario government for $250.

Spring, 1913, found Thomson again in Algonquin Park, this time on his own. He first stayed at a lodge on Canoe Lake, then camped out when the weather warmed. It was likely in this season that he met Winnifred Trainor, who later was to be his fiancé. When he was not sketching with oil paints, he often indulged in a favorite pastime of fishing, for which he had an impressive reputation. Thomson is known to have been an expert maker of fly-fishing lures, which he characteristically gave away.

In Toronto in October, Thomson met the painter A. Y. Jackson, who had just arrived from Montreal; in January of 1914, they moved together into the first available studio of the Studio Building, which had been constructed partially with the support of Dr. James McCallum, an important patron of the arts. McCallum and, to an extent, Jackson are credited with helping keep Thomson’s career in order, including looking after financial matters. Thomson was not indifferent to his own material well-being, but he was not a skilled organizer or promoter of his own activities. In 1914, the National Gallery of Canada purchased Thomson’s Moonlight, Early Evening , a sign that his career was advancing and the day approaching when he might rely on sales of his paintings to sustain him.

The summer of 1914 was spent first on Georgian Bay and then in Algonquin Park, but this was the last excursion on which Thomson could rely on the companionship of his fellow artists, as the war would soon disperse many of his group. Thomson himself was rejected from the army, although he was accustomed to an energetic outdoor life during summers; he had also attempted unsuccessfully to enlist for the Boer War in 1899. The war also affected his opportunities for commercial work, and during the next two years he found occasional work as a ranger, a firefighter, and a guide. In the summer of 1915, he even thought of traveling to the prairies to work in the grain harvest, a plan that might have produced an interesting body of work had he found the time to paint the landscape there, but McCallum commissioned some decorative panels from him, which kept him in Ontario for the season.

Thomson’s summer painting consisted mostly of small oil sketches on birch panels. From a few of these he would derive larger paintings during the winter months when he was at work in his studio. Critics have had divided feelings about the strength of some of the more detailed studio compositions based on the vigorous sketches produced in the field, but it is clear that some of them are very fine, gaining in precision of color effect more than they may have lost in spontaneity of brushwork.

A productive winter in 1916-1917 was followed by Thomson’s last spring and summer, which he spent at Canoe Lake. He was said to have produced then a series of sixty-two painted sketches depicting the unfolding of spring. It has not been possible to confirm this by correlating the body of his work, but such a series would not seem out of character for a painter whose skill and energy were at their height, and whose career was itself enjoying healthy growth.

Thomson’s death just before his fortieth birthday has been interpreted speculatively in many ways over the years, but the known facts hardly support any dark theories. On July 8, he paddled off to fish at one of the lakes near Canoe Lake and was not seen alive again. His overturned canoe was found later that day, but his body was not recovered until July 16. There was a four-inch cut on his right temple and evidence of his having bled from his right ear. As in a large proportion of canoe drownings, Thomson probably stood up briefly in his canoe, lost his balance, fell, and struck his head on the gunwale. This mundane account of the circumstances of his death has often been rejected by worshipful commentators and public as holding no meaning for the culture. Apart from possible injury, under ordinary circumstances falling out of a canoe is merely embarrassing; when an acclaimed artist in the prime of his career dies in such a fashion, high tragedy must supplant embarrassment.

Significance

Although Thomson was an interesting personality and a major contributor to Canada’s first important communal force in art the loose association that later became the Group of Seven it is in his paintings that one must seek the significance of his life. The myth of Thomson as a creative hero can be sustained only by a close appreciation of his works.

Thomson’s greatest achievement as a painter was to evoke a powerful sense of the north woods through the use of strong color. The ultimate source of his sense of color was the art of the French Impressionists, but Thomson himself had little direct, sustained contact with any large body of Impressionist art or for that matter with any of the dominant styles of the previous half century. Jackson has been quoted as saying, “Tom Thomson never saw a good picture in Toronto, European or otherwise.” Nevertheless, there are echoes in Thomson’s work of the painting of the mid-nineteenth century Barbizon school of France, as well as strong influences from then-current German expressionism; aspects of his style recall such varied artists as the Russian expatriate Wassily Kandinsky and Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. In fact, the foreign as well as Canadian influences on Thomson are extensive enough to raise the question of his originality and individuality, but critical opinion is favorable on this point: Thomson turned what he inherited to excellent use, integrating the elements he borrowed into a style of his own.

Thomson’s oil sketches are the largest of his works in the final years of his life. The characteristic subject matter is lakes, trees, and sky, and it is often the sky that is of central importance to a composition. Of Thomson’s composition, David P. Silcox remarks that Thomson had “an easy, even casual approach to the construction of his painting” and that “it was the desire to paint, to mix colour and expeditiously get on with it that saved Thomson from the compositional fussiness that pervades the structure of some Group [of Seven] painting.”

Much of Thomson’s best work is characterized by an element of roughness both of color and paint application. Some viewers are inclined to see this roughness as an attempt to evoke the harshness of the North, but to Thomson and his colleagues, the north woods were a paradise rather than a hostile environment, and they often painted in and near areas that were essentially summer resorts. A more convincing assessment of Thomson’s gestural brushwork and turbulent color is that he was moving toward a concept of painting like that of abstract expressionism of the 1950’s, in which the drama of the artist’s physical deployment of paint on canvas mirrors an emotional involvement with the worlds of nature, society, and the human spirit. Seen in this light, Thomson’s brief but productive career heralds the coming of age of a vigorous and indigenous Canadian art. Along with his colleagues in the Group of Seven and others, Thomson provided, in Harold Town’s words, a “starting line” for all that was to follow.

Bibliography

Addison, Ottelyn. Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years. Foreword by A. Y. Jackson, drawings, and an appendix by Thoreau MacDonald. Toronto, Ont.: Ryerson Press, 1969. Contains many detailed anecdotes about Algonquin Park and Thomson’s sojourns there from 1912. Plentiful photographs and records of conversations with friends and acquaintances give this small volume a feeling of authenticity and affection for the subject.

Grace, Sherrill. Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Not a biography of Thomson but an account of how others have re-created him as the quintessential Canadian: a lover of the outdoors, independent, rugged, and sporty. Grace argues, among other things, that the myth of Thomson has overshadowed his work as an artist of note.

Harper, J. Russell. Painting in Canada: A History. 2d. ed. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1977. This standard survey is useful for viewing the scope of Canadian painting. Town and Silcox contains a rebuttal, in passing, of a statement by Harper about the early reception of Thomson’s work, but the work is still excellent for its intended purpose.

Murray, Joan. The Art of Tom Thomson. Toronto, Ont.: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1971. A noted Canadian art curator surveys Thomson’s work in this exhibition catalog.

Pattison, Jeanne L. The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. Kleinburg, Ont.: McMichael Canadian Collection, 1977. The title of this paperbound volume shows readers both that Tom Thomson was not a member of the Group of Seven, since the group came into being as such three years after his death, and that it is necessary to put Thomson into the context of the group, as he was one of the leading exponents of landscape painting in the decade preceding its founding, and worked with many of its future members.

Silcox, David P. The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson: Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, J. E. MacDonald. Toronto, Ont.: Firefly Books, 2003. Silcox tells the story of Thomson and the Group of Seven. Richly illustrated with more than four hundred reproductions of paintings and drawings by the artists.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tom Thomson: An Introduction to His Life and Art. Toronto, Ont.: Firefly Books, 2002. A biography chronicling Thomson’s life, career, artistic influences, and the mystery surrounding his death.

Town, Harold, and David P. Silcox. Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 1977. An indispensable “appreciation” of the works of Thomson, this volume effectively juxtaposes essays by the perceptive Canadian artist Harold Town and those of art historian David P. Silcox. Both authors are straightforward in their praise and criticism of Thomson. The high-quality plates are well chosen and are supplied in generous numbers.